A Card From Angela Carter Read online

  For

  Liz Calder, Carmen Callil and Deborah Rogers

  – three of Angela’s friends

  Contents

  Twenty years ago ...

  Living Dolls

  Carnival

  Geisha

  Sic

  Chili

  Bambi

  Like A Flamingo

  Flickerings

  Fowl

  Fibs

  Vile

  Bliss

  Cats

  Splattered

  Bum

  Twin Peaks

  Ritzy

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  Twenty years ago I went for the first time into Angela Carter’s study. I knew the rest of her house in Clapham quite well. Downstairs was carnival: true, there was a serious kitchen, but there were also violet and marigold walls, and scarlet paintwork. A kite hung from the ceiling of the sitting room, the shelves supported menageries of wooden animals, books were piled on chairs. Birds – one of them looking like a ginger wig and called Carrot Top – were released from their cages to whirl through the air, balefully watched through the window by the household’s salivating cats. ‘Free range,’ said Angela. Here Angela’s husband Mark Pearce dreamed up the pursuits he went on to master: pottery, archery, kite-making, gunmanship, school-teaching; here friends streamed in and out for suppers; here their son Alexander was a much-hugged child.

  The study was unadorned, muted, more fifties than sixties. Not so much carnival as cranial. There was a small wooden desk by the window looking down to the street, The Chase: ‘SW4 0NR. It’s very easy to remember. SW4. Oliver. North. Reagan.’ There was a grey filing cabinet, shabby, well organised and stuffed with papers. I knew some of what I would find in that cabinet – Angela had told me – but there had not been time to go through everything.

  She had died a few weeks earlier, on 16 February 1992. She was fifty-one and had been suffering from lung cancer for over a year. Her early death sent her reputation soaring. Her name flew high, like the trapeze-artist heroine of Nights at the Circus: Fevvers, the ‘Cockney Venus’, zoomed upwards, ‘shaking out about her those tremendous red and purple pinions, pinions large enough, powerful enough to bear up such a big girl as she. And she was a big girl . . . Now all London lies beneath her flying feet.’ Three days after she died, Virago sold out of Angela’s books. She became, in words from the two poles of her vocabulary, an aerialiste and a celeb.

  Not that her fiction and her prose went unacknowledged while she was alive. She was not neglected and rarely had anything rejected; she was given solo reviews and launch parties; she went on television; she got cornered by fans. But she was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the ‘alternative pantheon’ of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the forties, when ‘in a curious way, women formed the ascendancy’. She spoke with some fellow feeling about J. G. Ballard, who was, she correctly predicted, about to be turned by critics from a science-fiction cult figure into a mainstream literary one. ‘Ballard is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same breath, or even the same paragraph as such peers as Anthony Powell or Iris Murdoch. Fans such as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess praise Ballard to the skies, but they themselves are classified differently as, God help us, “serious writers” in comparison.’

  We had talked about these things a year earlier, after her illness had been diagnosed and she had asked me to be her literary executor. We had met at the end of the seventies, when I was helping to set up the London Review of Books and was keen to get Angela to write for the paper. Liz Calder, who had shortly before published The Passion of New Eve and The Bloody Chamber at Gollancz, arranged an introduction and, swaddled in a big coat, Angela came into the small office, which had been carved out of the packing department in Dillons bookshop. She lit up the paper’s pages for the next twelve years. And we became friends.

  Her requirements for her estate were relaxed, if not exactly straightforward: I should do whatever was necessary to ‘make money for my boys’, for Mark and Alexander. There was to be no holding back on grounds of good taste; she had no objections to her prose being turned into an extravaganza on ice: on the contrary. Her only stipulation was that Michael Winner should not get his hands on it.

  I, of course, hoped to find in that filing cabinet a fragment from an abandoned novel or a clutch of unhatched short stories. And of course I knew I would not. For all her wild hair, Angela was careful. She was, as she put it, ‘both concentrated and random’. In the depths of her illness she had drawn up a plan for a final book of short stories, writing down the number of words alongside each title, and hoping that ‘all together, these might make a slim, combined volume to be called “American Ghosts and Old World Wonders”’: they did. In one of her desk drawers there was a small red cashbook in which she wrote down her fees and expenses.

  No big fiction had been left unpublished. But there were surprises. The files in the cabinet were bulging with drama. Angela had had good fortune with her radio plays but was less lucky with writing for theatre and movies. Among her unproduced screenplays, The Christchurch Murder (1987) covered the same story – the killing of a woman by her teenage daughter and friend – as Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures. Her largest unproduced theatrical work was a version of Wedekind’s Lulu, a hard (elongated, sprawling) play to bring off, but apt for Angela. She was beguiled by Louise Brooks, who had glided onto celluloid as Lulu. Admiring the challenge her eyes threw out under the famous fringe, Angela claimed that, ‘Should I ever have a daughter, I would call her not Simone, not even Rosa but Lulu.’ It was imaginative of Richard Eyre’s National Theatre to commission the adaptation in 1987, but though the script went through several densely written drafts, it was eventually rejected. Angela was not forgiving. When I ran into her at a party in Tufnell Park shortly afterwards, she was white-faced and narrow-eyed with fury: ‘The National have just flushed my Lulu down the toilet.’ The most tantalising unfinished piece was something she had not mentioned during our talks: a treatment of Virginia Woolf’s sex-change novel Orlando which she had started to turn into an opera to be set to music by Michael Berkeley. One of Angela’s ideas was that the entire production should take place in the fabric department of Marshall & Snelgrove.

  There were other, more personal, unpublished finds. I knew she had drawn but I had not realised how much. Tucked in among the files were richly coloured crayon pictures: of flowers with great tongue-like petals, of slinking cats, and of Alexander, whose baby face with its bugle cheeks, dark curls and big black eyes looked like that of the West Wind on ancient maps; his mother described his face as being like a pearl.

  She had told me that she kept journals and described the shape they took. They were partly working notes and partly casual jottings, roughly arranged so that the two kinds of entry were on opposite pages. They were stacked in the study: lined exercise books in which she had started to write during the sixties and which covered nearly thirty years of her life. She decorated their covers as girls used to decorate their school books, with cut-out labels (the Player’s cigarette sailor was one), paintings of cherubs and flowers and patterns of leaves. Inside she described, in her clear, upright, not quite flowing hand ‘a smoked gold day’ in 1966, and in the same year made a list of different kinds of monkeys: rhesus, capuchin and lion-tailed. She wrote of the ‘silver gilt light on Brandon Hill’ in 1969, jotted down a recipe for soup using the balls of a cock and, in her later pages
, took notes on Ellen Terry’s lectures on Shakespeare. She made, again and again, lists of books and lists of films (Jean-Luc Godard featured frequently). She did not write down gossip (though she liked gossip), and wrote little about her friends. She specialised in lyrical natural description and in dark anecdote. She noted that the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe had died of a burst bladder because he had not dared to get up from a banquet to have a pee. She observed that the pork pies favoured by her mother’s family for wakes, in part because they could be bought ready-made, ‘possess a semiotic connection with the corpse in the coffin – the meat in the pastry’, and added, referring to Beatrix Potter’s most chilling tale of fluffy life: ‘Tell that to Tom Kitten.’ She wondered what smell Alexander would remember from his childhood home.

  The revelation for me in the journals was that, in her twenties, Angela had written poems – verses that strikingly prefigured her novels in richness of expression, in their salty relish, in their feminism and in their use of fable. At the same time she produced a statement of intent which came startlingly close to prophesy: ‘I want to make images that are personal, sensuous, tender and funny – like the sculpture of Arp, for example, or the paintings of Chagall. I may not be very good yet but I’m young and I work very hard – or fairly hard.’

  I have a small collection of Angela material. As well as the newspaper cuttings, the business notes from publishers, the grief-filled letters from friends after her death, there are a few browning, frayed letters, written mostly on lined exercise-book paper, always in longhand (though her hand was square rather than long), generally prompted by some London Review inquiry to her when she was abroad. There is on my mantelpiece a clockwork Russian doll, made out of tin with bright orange blotches on her cheeks and a design of blue teardrops on her stiff full skirt: a present from Angela and Mark. And there are a dozen or so cards, dashed off in greeting or explanation, sometimes with a full message, sometimes just a salute. These cards make a paper trail, a zigzag path through the eighties. They are casually despatched – some messages are barely more than a signature – but are often the more telling for that: they catch Angela on the wing, shooting her mouth off. She would have hated the idea of a soundbite, but she had a gift for a capsule phrase, for a story in a word. In their celerity, postcards are the email of the twentieth century, but they are also more than that. They tell more than one story: the photographs, paintings and cartoons that Angela chose sometimes reinforce but often contradict the message on the other side. They can contain hidden histories: some of Angela’s images glance back at an episode in her life, or hint at a conversation we had been having. Sometimes, of course, the choice of picture is random: it hints at nothing. In a few years’ time it will be harder to know which is random, which is allusive.

  I first looked at these cards when writing a series of talks about postcards for Radio 3; I looked at them again when it was suggested to me that those talks might become a book. I look at them now with the idea that they evoke some of the occasions, preoccupations and delights of Angela’s life. A life of which, as she put it, ‘The fin has come a little early this siècle.’

  Living Dolls

  Here they are, the girls. Five of them sitting in a row. Some are smaller in girth than others, but all of them have plump curved cheeks, dark almond eyes and slightly open cupid mouths. Each is sumptuously and decorously clad in early twentieth-century mode. All have titfers perched on their heads: one with a lace trim secured by a pearl, another with flowers slipping down its slopes, a third with a fronded plume like a pony’s tail. They are done up primly in tightly secured collars, lace bibs and ruffs, and full sleeves. But their stiff legs are wide apart, their long skirts are partly rolled up; you can see petticoats and a flash of drawers.

  The card, posted in the summer of 1989 from London but bought in Hungary, was nearly not sent. Angela’s blue-biro message says: ‘Budapest is bliss, bliss, bliss. So much so that I never got to post any letters.’ She has added in black ink: ‘I found this among my souvenirs & thought I’d post it off, anyway.’ I’m glad she did. Of the cards I’ve seen from Angela, certainly of those she sent me, this brown and white, lush but shadowy photograph is the one that most evokes her stories and essays: not her style – the picture is posed, stately, static, striving for correctness, the very opposite of Angela’s helter-skelter hoopla prose – but her subject matter. These creatures are dolls – it’s hard not to think of The Magic Toyshop – whose bodies are too rigid to be saucy and too adult to be petted; they are showcases of femininity, made-up versions of the sex that makes itself up.

  Fascinated by pretenders, shams, copies and twins, Angela wrote about the way that leather and suede and velvet can ‘simulate the skin it conceals’, and the way plaster can be made to look as if it ripples like marble. And she spoke of being an impersonator. As a young journalist, she said she would, ‘quite unconsciously, posit a male point of view as the general one. So there was an element of the male impersonator about this young person as she was finding herself.’ As a big, pink-skinned and blue-eyed creature in Japan, she looked into the eyes of her dainty dark lover and saw that she had become ‘a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator.’

  By the time I knew her, Angela’s face was free of make-up and her hair stripped of dye. She was the first woman I knew who went grey without looking like a granny: on the contrary, she turned everything on its head by doing so as she was becoming a mother. Her disregard not only for fashion but for neatness was a dirty-strike display. It was not that she was uninterested in people’s appearance – on one of the last afternoons I spent with her she went through our acquaintances ranking them in order of handsomeness. Still, she herself stopped putting on the Ritz. Antonia Fraser, appearing on a television programme with Angela, once said that she had not been able to conceal a flicker of astonishment when Angela had admired her dress. No flicker was ever lost on Angela. ‘I wonder why people are always so surprised when I’m interested in clothes,’ she said, not wondering at all. And laughed. She abandoned fashion with caustic flair and childlike defiance. When Lorna Sage discovered, while staying with her, that she had lost her make-up, Angela handed her a Japanese paintbox, which Sage described as ‘some kind of actor’s or geisha’s kit, which was all slick purple, rusty carmine and green grease’.

  Angela had many guises: the only constant feature of being snapped was, she said with some pride, that photographers were always asking her to lower her cheekbones. In her twenties, with short curls, attenuated limbs and a loose scarf round her neck, she looks like a faun and seems to be sitting on a mushroom. The many studies of her in maturity, when she was both heavier and better known, are less whimsical and not often smiling. There was Angela in her last year, at her typewriter, chin on hand, looking fed up, in a capacious plaid skirt and a sloppy joe (perhaps the jumper that Carmen Callil remembers her wearing to Glyndebourne); in front of her – as shorthand for ‘writer’ – is a big waste-paper basket piled high with papers. There is Angela in headscarf and thin-framed specs looking jolly and forthright and toothy, a rare cast of face that made her look like some media idea of a librarian. There she is in an extraordinary midnight-blue, black and brown Holy Family composition with Mark and Alexander, in which the three of them seem to be travelling out of shadows, with the light hitting only the sides of Mark and Angela’s faces and her arm. Alex is perched on his father’s shoulders, holding on to his long curls, looking seraphic; Mark is bearded, dark-browed, and looks, for all his steady atheism, like John the Baptist; Angela smiles up at him, holding onto her baby’s chubby foot.

  Still, the pictures that show her alone in close-up are the most compelling. She had a large but fluid, almost fuzzy face; watching her was sometimes like looking at someone underwater, sometimes like seeing a diver break cover at the surface. Perhaps it was all those waves. Not just the sweep of her massy hair – springing away
from her brow and tumbling down to her shoulders – but also the rolling planes of her face, the high forehead, the prominent round cheekbones. And the soft full mouth. A 1985 portrait shows her with (that other shorthand for writer or brainy woman) specs in hand, wearing a thick, star-patterned jersey: the camera comes in so close to her face that you can see not only the thin lines across her forehead but the complicated texture of her skin, unsmoothed by foundation cream. In perhaps the most evidently beautiful picture, she is captured against a black background, and is herself in black; her hair has been subdued into a loose curl and she – head tilted back and looking as if she could have been a movie star had she been bothered – has an expression of benign sadness. These pictures are so intense, the face for all its concealments seeming so naked, that for anyone who felt for Angela, through her work or in person, they are hard to look at.

  Not least because their beautiful seriousness misses out so much. Angela laughed often and loudly. She was a cackler. She was also a talker, a gasser and a tremendous chatterer on the phone. Angela belonged to the radio age, growing up with the sweetness of John Masefield’s Box of Delights and the sepulchral tones of The Man in Black. She claimed that the wireless was ‘the most visual of mediums because you cannot see it’, and steered her plots through a tremendous range of sounds. The opening moments of her 1976 play Vampirella feature the cooing of doves, the scrape of nails against the bars of a cage, a harp that sounds like laughter and the screech of a bat; in her play about the afflicted painter Richard Dadd, broadcast three years later, there are hobgoblin choruses and camel shriekings; in its radio form, The Company of Wolves resounds to the rattle of bones and the noise of throat-slitting. She asked for chill, asexual voices, tiny fairy screams and affected coughs. She knew what it was to make a voice distinctive – as a schoolgirl, she had wanted to act – and her own tones were unmistakable.